Dancing Lost Gestures
Sanctuary on the Fault Line Second Cycle
Dancing Lost Gestures is the second cycle of gathering for composting and fortifying together in the fugitive, feminist dance movement Sanctuary on the Fault Line.
Taking place from September 2025 to June 2026 there will be 6 workshops, performances and retreats and a podcast, which will act as a soul friend to all dancers, professional, self professed and hidden who would like to dip their toe, or dive in to the practice of this movement. A movement which unsticks dance from civilised, systemic and conditioned regulation, inviting it to wild space so it can germinate dances that hold and move us otherwise, and spill them among us; a movement woven from running with the wolves feminism, contemporary movement science and re-connection to the non-human world.
There are many lost gestures returning to those who practice this work, and moving like a contagion in their communities and in this cycle we will be making ground for these: deep light, burial, wind, anam cara and river. See the events below and their booking links as these go live. Announcements also going to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line mailing list, when booking opens, write here to join.
Dancing Lost Gestures is visioned, invited and curated by dancer, care taker and instigator or Sanctuary on the Fault Line, Rolfer and musician Hayley J S Matthews. With creation and collaboration from Isadora Duncan legacy dancer and teacher Barbara Kane, dancers Debbie Allen, Rachel Elderkin, Betsy Field, Sara Wookey, Sandra Voulgari, Ella Mesma and Helen Edwards; musicians Marina Avetisian, Jocelyn West and Alistair Simmons; historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows; the Meditateo Centre, London and the London wilds.
Dancing Lost Gestures events
DEEP LIGHT, September 13 -14, 2025 ~ A live performance (13/09) and workshop (14/09), London
Deep Light is a performance and workshop shared by dancers and musicians moving with the deep legacy of dancer Isadora Duncan and the new contemplative, feminist legacy of the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement. You can come to the performance, the workshop, or both. They will bath us in the lost gesture of ‘deep light’. We’ll move with some of Duncan’s choreographies, from a moment in her life when she met a very deep space and found deep support and immense lightness, with Celtic notions of embedded and embodied light, with a new dance and live music piece from the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement and with embodiments of yielding and becoming.
Booking:
performance: https://meditatiocentrelondon.org/events/deeplightsaturday/
workshop: https://meditatiocentrelondon.org/events/deeplightsunday/
BURIAL, October 29 - 30, 2025: Burial ~ A dancing intervention, London
Burial is a dancing intervention, inviting any dancer or those called to dance, to learn and perform the simple and meaningful choreography of ‘Burial of the (Witches) Women’, and to perform it together in the London wilds in a gift economy. The dance is a ritual that buries the women who were never buried, and never ‘witches’, and calls and celebrates their spirits and lives as healer, body worker, weaver, seer, dancer, sister, mother…back among us. And by doing so repairs the frozen parts in us, and the rupture in the tapestry of the feminine that once made a web for us all, passed down, body to body, embodied culture to embodied culture. But was torn by those persecutions and the distrust, suppression and fear that followed.
By re-birthing these actions of burial, celebration and acknowledgement that were missed, we bring movement in a flood of dancing that weaves communal recovery. And also connect to the Celtic rite at this time of year, which was never about ghouls but about calling our ancestors to be with us for the year ahead.
To somehow meet the strange nature of this territory in women’s lives (and a similar territory in the systemic reality of our dancing lives) there is no fee or payment to join as a dancer, and we will all call in an audience together. There will be an invitation to public, friends, neighbours and colleagues to come and be part, as witnesses and to contribute financially through a gift economy for the ritual, all dancers will share those gifts.
Booking: Write here to tell us you’d like to come as dancer or witness and we’ll send you your invite.
‘Burial of the (Witches) Women’ was made by dancer and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews, within the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement with the woods and weather in which we’ll dance it.
WIND ~ ROOTING, January 10, 2026 ~ A retreat, online
With dancer and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews and historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows. We’ll be diving into embodiments, music and some pertinent work by Reine Maria Rilke to call back the gesture of the ‘inner wind’. We’ll explore being taken by spirit within. In the body this quality can be found in the lymph and breath system, we’ll be waking this up in our own bodies, and poetically by our work with Rilke.
Booking, write here to request booking info once it opens
REMEMBERING EARTH, April 26, 2026, 2-4 PM ~ A workshop, Oxford
A workshop with Sanctuary on the Fault Line dancer Helen Edwards. Remembering Earth, movement for staying alive, remembering lost gestures and creating peripheral ecologies. IN Headington Hill Park.
Booking soon, to register your interest write to Helen at hels@bodylogix.co.uk
WIND ~ FLYING, May 2, 2026 ~ A retreat, London
With dancer Hayley J S Matthews and historian of mystics, visionaries and poets Mark Burrows, more info and booking coming soon.
Booking, write here to request booking info once it opens
THE ANAM CARA OF THE DANCES OF TOMORROW, THROUGHOUT - an eleven episode podcast, which will be a guide to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line practice. Online.
The podcast will be found wherever you get your podcasts and each episode announced to the Sanctuary on the Fault Line mailing list, which you are welcome to request to join here.
If you would like one of these events to come to your community elsewhere, please let me know and let’s see if it is possible